Overview of Unit 1

Conservation of the self is preserving or maintaining who we are, how we are organised and how we
adapt to our relationships and patterns of behaviour. Whenever we use language, we, therefore,
reflect who we are in terms of our own frame of reference and blueprints. This is done when we view
language as a process in terms of the identity of the self, the speech situation, and the process
underlying the language of survival and coordination.

You must go through this section before attempting to do your assignment. Your assignment
will not open unless you have gone through the section.

1.1 Language as a process

For you to understand the following section, consider the questions below.

• To what extent does your background and culture, i.e., your frames of reference,
influence the way you use language to communicate with other people?
• Have you ever noticed that you use different words and registers of language in the
same situation when you speak to different people?

Imagine yourself (The man sitting at the desk in the pictures, on the left) in the following
situation and fill in a question that you would pose to the person greeting you.
Reflect and elaborate using the pictures

1. Was there any difference in the words you used?

2. Why did you use the specific words in each case?

Now, in each of these situations, you as a person are required to ‘survive’, i.e., you need to
say something in such a way that it fits the speech situation. You do this by, for
example, asking a question, i.e., you use language to interact with the other
person. However, the questions that you ask may vary from situation to situation. Your
attitude is different for each speech situation and these differences are then expressed in terms
of the language that you use.

I am sure that different people filled in different questions above. Why? Is it because we
have different attitudes towards the persons appearing before us? The answer should be
related to the fact that each one of us has a specific identity that needs to be preserved to
enable us to survive linguistically within each specific speech situation. We also need to be
able to adapt to different speech situations. This ability enables us to change the questions
that we ask in each speech situation. We also reproduce certain words or phrases in similar
situations. The first reaction is to say: “Good Morning”. This works within the speech
situation and is used repeatedly. The way a person answers the telephone in the same way
repeatedly is an example of this. We all, therefore, adhere to the basic human need for
the conservation of identity (the self), adaptation and reproduction in every speech
situation in a specific linguistic environment.

According to linguistic identity, every individual has an idiolect. It is a variety of language

and grammar, or words, idioms, or pronunciations that are unique to an individual. The
grouping of words and phrases is unique, rather than an individual using specific words that
nobody else uses. An idiolect can easily evolve into an ecolect — a dialect variant specific to
a household. Forensic linguists use idiolects to decide if a certain person did or did not
produce a given piece of writing (or transcribed speech). While often passing unnoticed in
speech, some idiolects, particularly unusual ones employed by famous individuals, are
immortalized in the form of nicknames. A famous example is the nickname of Willie
Mays ("the Say-Hey Kid"), who frequently used "say hey".

In each speech situation, the meaning of words is of crucial importance when we

communicate. Words are the tools or instruments that we use to communicate
with. Dictionaries are useful aids for looking up the meanings of words. Take any dictionary
of another official language other than English or Afrikaans and compare the meaning of the
basic words that are used to greet, e.g., Dumela/ Dumelang (Setswana). You will find that
they are often translated in English as ‘Good Morning’ or ‘Hallo’. Can we really translate
these words directly into English as ‘Good Morning’ or ‘Hallo’? Does the use of these words
to greet indicate a difference in attitude in terms of the language user in relation to a specific
culture? Does the etymology of a word still play a part in the modern use of the word?

As for the use of language as a medium of communication, a significant distinction needs to

be drawn between the user of the language (addressor: speaker/writer) and the receiver of
the language (addressee who receives and interprets the message: hearer/reader). The use of
language is on a different level for each of these language users. The s (shorthand for
speaker/s and writer/s) uses language to get a message across to h (shorthand for hearer/s and
reader/s) that needs to receive and interpret the message. As for h a significant distinction
can be made between a receiver (a person who receives and interprets the message) and an
addressee (a person who is an intended receiver of the message). A receiver might be a
bystander or an eavesdropper, rather than an addressee. What happens when we think? Do
we speak when we think? Is there a speaker and a hearer?

One thing is certain, whenever we use language, we reflect who we are. This also includes
how we are organised and how we are adapted to our relationships and patterns of
behaviour. The understanding of other peoples' attitudes and worldviews can only be
generated from within their own internal frames of reference. Language is the medium
by which people present their frames of reference, their unique blueprints, and maps of the
world, their attitudes, and worldviews.

The question is now: “How does language come to serve such important functions, how does
it acquire the power to shape interpersonal and inter-group transactions, blueprints of the
world, and maps of reality?” In other words, how do we express our own imprinted attitudes
and worldviews through language?

1.2: How do we see each other?

Read the following article, to help you understand a few aspects of how we see each
other. While reading the article, consider the following questions:

• What did you learn from this article in terms of language diversity?
• Is it about the coordination of actions among humans and their environment?
• Does this mean that humans must interact and communicate in order to understand
one another?

Yes, they certainly do!

It is during this process of interaction and communication that language usage plays an
important role. During this interaction process humans need to adhere to basic
linguistic cooperative principles when they use language to interact. They need to give the
right amount of information, they need to try to make sure that the contribution they make is
true, they need to be relevant and be perspicuous (avoid obscurity of expression, avoid
ambiguity, be brief and be orderly).

Note: This activity is NOT for marks, however, it will help you to get your ideas ready for the
Portfolio and for the preceding Assignments.
How do we see each other? (Article)

• What do we think about the culture and traditions of our fellow South Africans?
• What about when people adopt children from another cultural group, who also speak
other languages?
• What does this mean when it comes to language?

How we see each other - Language Diversity

Think about the picture and read the article below. Note, the picture is not of the family
mentioned in the article, but a similar family of white people who adopted two children from
a different language and cultural group in their country.

• Read this article from The Times (Feb 16, 2008) and think about that question.

The skin colour of Julie and Roger Greaves’ who adopted an African pigeon pair is not a
subject taken lightly in their house. To the white, middle-class Greaveses, their chocolate-
brown children show they had no qualms about crossing the cultural divide when they
adopted them.

While seven-year-old Kayleigh and five-year-old Zane are being raised in keeping with the
Greaveses’ English- speaking South African culture, the couple have opened themselves to
understanding cultural differences, particularly within the African community to which their
children are linked.

“It makes you realise how little you know and are more eager to understand,” said Julie
Greaves. But, said husband Roger, “when you speak of adopting and embracing Africans
into your life and your home, you can only teach them what you know and how you live”.

The Greaveses’ views are reflected in a recent study conducted by TNS Research Surveys,
which polled 2000 South Africans to establish if they felt threatened by other cultures and
whether they perceived their own culture and traditions as important.
The study found that while a third of the 2000 participants said they found other cultures
threatening — this being most pronounced among black people — 63% embraced cultural
diversity.

TNS Research Surveys’ Neil Higgs said an analysis of the data revealed that “working
people” were less likely to feel threatened. “Those in upper-income brackets and those with
jobs feel more secure and probably find that their experience of other cultures is now familiar
and not novel,” he said.

The study showed that a higher level of insecurity about other cultures was prevalent among
the poor and could be fueled partly by their relative lack of contact with other cultures.
Broken down further, the results looked at fear of other cultures by language group, with 37%
of Zulu- speakers feeling threatened, compared with 25% of English, Afrikaans, and Tswana
speakers.

When it came to retaining one’s culture and tradition, 86% of the people polled said it was an
important part of cultural identity. Women, in particular, felt strongly about the issue.

Alberton bookkeeper Rosie Roberts is one such person. She has preserved her Portuguese
roots but has also adopted Indian culture in some aspects of her life. It was the popular
Bollywood epic Devdas that hooked Roberts on Indian culture. Her son, who has also taken
an interest in Indian culture, even bought her a punjabi — a traditional Indian outfit — as a
Christmas present.

“Ever since I started watching Bollywood a few years ago, I became interested in other
cultures. I became fascinated with the music, the beautiful costumes, the way Indians relate to
each other, and the food.” Her interest in Indian culture has allowed her to enjoy a good
relationship with her Indian neighbour. “I feel like an Indian princess when I wear traditional
outfits. I am really into the Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan — I think he is one of the
sexiest men alive.”

She has even learnt how to greet and express her love in Hindi. “That’s important, so one
day I can tell Shah Rukh Khan how I feel about him,” she said, laughing. Roberts said she
believed that understanding another culture allowed people to relate better to each other.

However, University of Cape Town sociologist Professor Jeremy Seekings said that while a
better understanding of cultures may foster better inter-racial relationships, it could also
entrench a sense of difference. “Understanding does not necessarily mean that everyone
becomes friends. It would not be surprising if South Africans are more open-minded now
than they were under apartheid. There are many reasons why it would not be surprising:
South Africans are exposed to many integrative messages in the public media and come into
contact with each other in the workplace far more than in the past.”

Seekings said South Africans were adopting aspects of other cultures in their lives. “Middle-
class South Africans happily embrace all sorts of cross-cultural things as evidence of their
cultural cosmopolitanism. Black CEOs drive imported cars from Europe and wear Italian
suits, and black women wear white wedding dresses, while white CEOs wear traditional dress
(at least Madiba shirts) at social occasions. There are even white sangomas,” Seekings said.

He said there were differences between understanding, accepting, and embracing other
cultures. “I guess it will be a very long time before South Africans move to this phase —
embracing — at least in a substantive way,” he said. He ascribed the feeling of being
threatened by other cultures to two factors: language and history. “We should not
underestimate the importance of linguistic divisions in South Africa. Many South Africans
do not understand each other well, if at all, when they speak in their home language. The big
divide is between people whose home languages are not of African origin — English and
Afrikaans — and those whose languages are Xhosa, Sotho or Zulu.”

He said history was harder to deal with. “South Africans are, for the most part, either the
descendants of settlers or the descendants of people native to Southern Africa. These are two
very different cultural traditions. Political and economic power were used for a long time to
lift up one set of cultures and suppress the other.” Seekings said that cultural differences
between South Africans had been highly politicised and could not be easily undone.

University of KwaZulu-Natal sociologist Rob Pattman said that respect for cultural
differences was a post- apartheid ideal enshrined in the idea of the rainbow nation. - “But
how do people in contemporary South Africa view other cultures? That so many people of
different races find other cultures quite threatening suggests we are a far cry from living in a
rainbow nation.” Pattman said this was supported by articles published in a recent collection,
'Undressing Durban', in which university students and lecturers examined people’s identities
and their relations. “Many of these articles suggest that culture is closely associated in
people’s minds with race. They also show that people do not engage very much with other
cultures or races, let alone celebrate these. Rather, they tend to stick to their own.”

But, asked social anthropologist Sally Frankental, “why conflate race and culture? What’s
the relationship — since race is bio-genetic and culture is learnt?” She said a better
understanding 'of others’ ways of being and doing might improve relationships between the
followers of particular ways if the practitioners of those ways had equal access to resources,
and mutual respect prevailed”.

For little Kayleigh Greaves, race, skin colour and cultural differences are insignificant in her
life. All she knows is that “we have a really good family”.

(Suthentira Govender, Feb 16, 2008, The Times)

1.3 Importance of context

What do we mean by Context?

Within this whole process of interaction, the importance of context must also be considered.
Interaction and communication always occur in a particular physical, interpersonal or
ideational context. It can be any background knowledge assumed to be shared by the s and
the h and which contributes to h’s interpretation of what s means by a given
utterance. Behaviour also has meaning in context and can only appear to be random or
inappropriate if an observer negates the context or frame within which that behaviour would
make sense. In order to coordinate actions, humans have to draw distinctions. Our lives
depend on our ability to appreciate distinctions and to create a difference. It is possible to
know and survive in the world only if one can distinguish one object, process, or pattern from
another.

In the case of human beings, language becomes the tool for drawing essential distinctions and
for choreographing contexts of survival. The goal(s) of an utterance depends on the type of
distinctions a s draws. A language of survival needs to be used in each and every speech
situation. Consider the following processes underlying the language of survival and co-
ordination:

(a) A human being learns to draw distinctions based on her operations of distinction
dictated by her/his epistemology(knowledge and justified belief) or worldview (which is
shared by others). The term "epistemology" may be defined as "... a set of immanent rules
used in thought by large groups of people to define reality" (Auerswald, 1980:1). In the
following units we formulate the different ways in which ethnic groups specify and maintain
immanent and explicit meanings, attitudes, and worldviews.

(b) These distinctions are described in words. Words may be defined as tokens for the
linguistic co-ordination of actions. For example, most people do not kill and cook a bull
anymore - it is the convention to sit down at a restaurant and use printed words on the menu
to order a steak. These words bring forth a series of actions resulting in the delivery of a slab
of meat cooked to one's specifications.

(c) Words carry meanings, which may be defined as intersubjective linguistic realities
and consensually agreed upon experiences.

(d) Meanings form a language, which may be described as comprising sets of ascribed
meaning about phenomena and processes. In this view, language may be described as a
means to an end, and also as a context in which we live. Boxer and Kenny (1990:209)
suggested that language can be viewed "... as a parasite which steadily invades the newly
born human being until he or she reaches the point of 'having learned how to speak' and of
having been completely colonised by this invading parasite. Just like a parasite, after the
initial struggle to 'learn how to speak', the human host is no longer aware of it, and lives in
this condition like a fish in the medium of water as if it were totally 'natural' ".

(e) Language drives the choreography of behaviour and social organisation essential
to survival, creativity and expanding differentiation. As scholars and human observers,
we must account for the world of real people, objects, and processes, but in addition to that,
we have to account for the different human groupings (observers) who generate these worlds
of realities. Human beings cannot exist apart from their ‘languaging’ medium, since "...
language supports the structure of the community" (Efran, Lukens & Lukens, 1990:115).

All of this happens within the metacontext, that is, the context of contexts in which we
live. One may specify the knowledge society, the global information world, the fourth world
of poverty and exclusion - this metacontext will inform and constrain the processes already
discussed. Clearly, one of the most important contextual challenges at the national and
international level is the management of differences, and the amplification of differences in
the interactions between cultures, nationalities, the first and fourth worlds, and so on. The
"fourth world" is an emerging set of communities of social exclusion occurring within all
countries, constituted by the "homeless, incarcerated, prostituted, criminalised, brutalised,
stigmatised, sick, and illiterate people" (Day, Personal communication, 21 September 2000)].
Human beings are linked to each other and the world they share through language, the
symbols used to represent and describe things and events. Distinctions and descriptions in
language generate the phenomena that we observe, and this should alert us to the incredible
power inherent in the human ability to use language. Language may be used to create
contexts of creativity, reconciliation, destruction, mutual confirmation, war, and so
on. Maturana and Varela (1987:248), the Chilean biologists, maintain that "... every human
act takes place in language".

1.4 Self-reflection, recursion, and misunderstanding

Reflection and misunderstandings

We know how humans engage in recurrent interactions (co-ordinations of action) with other
human beings to survive. Reciprocal interactions over time lead to continual coordination of
actions. Human beings are of sufficient complexity to coordinate their actions with their
thoughts and put them into communication, thus giving rise to language. We use words and
meanings to coordinate our behaviour; we live in a domain of constant semantic
interactions. In this consensual linguistic domain, we can also speak about and formulate
meaning about ourselves.

This recursive ability enables us to question our own distinctions and creations, and as Efran
(1994:221) cites Anaïs Nin: "We don't see things as they are; we see them as we are". We do
not understand the dynamics of other cultures in an absolute sense, but only our images of
these cultures as they are exposed to our own cognitive filters and methods of questioning.
Each culture may be viewed as a club, and the distinctions and rules of various clubs
differ. Misunderstanding stems from operating in different clubs whose rules differ (Efran,
Lukens & Lukens, 1990:144).

How Ubuntu relates to our ideas of language and identity

Watch the video on YouTube of former Archbishop Desmond Tutu, as he explains the
important concept of Ubuntu in the South African context:

Difference as Resource

The variety of opinions and ideas covered in the following units may create the impression
that differences among cultures and groups are severely problematic and constraining and can
only lead to mutually exclusive domains of meaning, as well as to escalating tension. You
will do well to remember that perception is based on difference, that information is "a
difference which makes a difference" (Bateson, 1979:4), that difference partly explains one's
choice of a life partner, and that evolution and growth are based on difference.

Differences help us understand others

Narration is "... the representation of the flow of events in a meaningful sequence. Thus,
without narrative, there is no meaningful depiction of change over time ..." (Vogel,
1994:243). The major challenge to South Africans is the management of differences and
news of relations among various groupings in our society. Far from being frightening and
inhibiting, the difference should be celebrated in a multi-cultural context, since difference and
news of difference are the very stuff which fuels novelty, creativity, and change.

Reflect on your learning in this unit

Remember, you should reflect on what you have learned in each unit, as you move from one
to the next. In this Unit, we discussed many ideas that deal with the topic of Language as a
Process. In the next unit, we will look at how language affects our attitudes and world view.

Before you go: Reflect on your learning in Unit 1

Before we finish Unit 1, we want you to take some time and reflect on what you think are the
main ideas. Use the discussion tool and add to your reflection that you started in Unit 0, as
Ice Breaker 2, and in the First Portfolio Activity.

You are adding to your previous reflection, so click on Add discussion topic

1. Put a new title and the date to start the new blog.
2. Reflect on what you have learned.
3. What was the main purpose of Unit 1, in your opinion?
4. What were the ideas behind Assignment 01 and the First Portfolio Activity?
5. Do you have anything else that you learned from the activities and discussions in this
unit?
6. How long did it take you to complete the activities for this unit?
7. Add anything else you want to reflect about.